January 18, 2012

My blog gets about the same amount of traffic as his. (A little more, actually, lately.) And with Meade's help, my blog now goes with "back-end moderation," as discussed here. It was hard to get around the realization that this is the best approach and that it can actually be done. It does involve paying a lot of attention, applying judgment, and remembering who's said what and what you've done about it in the past. This is a behind-the-scenes role, and maybe it's too Meade-specific for other bloggers to use. But it's working for me.

For the record Althouse has never kicked me off, although I come and go as I please. And when my posts are deleted by Meade I find the inconsistency somewhat amusing, such is the nature of most political blogs.

btw, you can ban an IP address, but it's fairly easy to come up w/another IP address and nic if one is totally "consumed" w/a certain blog lol.

Garage Mahal beat himself thoroughly in the famous Gore's House/Bush's House debacle. It was amazing to watch. He admits, good-naturedly (as long as you don't bring it up too often) that he was dead wrong.

Maybe the only secret to 'good "back-end moderation" of comments' is a thick skin.

Surely there is validity to this, however there is also the rabid jaguar that keeps trying to piss all over the restaurant you like to visit day to day. Something's got to be done about that Jaguar. In this particular case, whatever the means, however it shook it, it worked. That Jaguar turned sock puppet then pretty much sulked back to it's lair.

ok, I misread edutcher as Althouse certainly has never kicked my ass. Hell, she's only relied to me 4/5 times, the last one to which edutcher refers ?!? she called me some childish names and said I wasn't funny.

Comments are down, it doesn't take a math professor to figure that out. A lot of the more irreverent, non sycophants are gone. Be careful what you wish for Ms. and Mrs. Althouse. It's been boring the past few weeks. And, although you like to think you are the whole show, you ain't deary. I'm guessing you never played a team sport.

"I've noticed that the number of comments per thread has dropped dramatically."

I haven't. But if you are right, it's only the number, not the total substance of what's there. We get rid of a certain kind of back-and-forth stuff between 2 or 3 commenters that made the number go up, but drove most readers away.

Wordpress does a better job at this (via plugins) than blogger. There are lots of comment moderation plugins that show a previous comment count per user etc - or that automatically post comments from commenters that have had a previous comment approved.

I'm visualizing Chauncey the gardener played superbly by Peter Sellers in Being There. He's walking down the street and some thugs start hassling him. Chauncey, thinking he can control everything w/ his tv remote tries to change the channel.

I suppose someone w/ little power would relish what little they have and invariably abuse it.

High traffic blog moderation doesn't work for solo blogs (see Ta-Nehisi Coates) or comment sections (bhtv) where the moderators pay attention sporadically and have their own biases.

Ta-Nehisi's comment section is now largely an internal progressive comment section adorned with many sycophants for good measure. He too often deletes comments that straight forwardly undermine his post or that conflict with the mob mentality of his sycophants. Pretty much if you disagree with him, he'll delete what you write. Especially when he's wrong and posted something not supported with evidence.

He actually accused me of lying once... when there was no such basis for him to assert as much. He had no idea what he was doing because he was not paying close enough attention to the discussion.

With Meade you have help and he reads it all (more or less) and had knowledge of what people have said before. So there is good faith on y'all's part, I think.

However, I liked the previous regime better... just letting people post whatever unless it was spam. Under the current regime you can make mistakes and wrongly punish peoples' comments.

Well, everything is a double-edged sword. I miss some of the more "creative" LOL invective here by some no longer allowed but at the end 30 posts by two people in a pi$$ing contest gets old fast. Best to hie by Aristotle's "Golden-Rule": Everything in "moderation." lol..

"But you know - they are just blog comments after all. Most people save copies if they believe their comments are truly worthwhile, right?"

Yes, we are just talking about blog comments after all. I'm not sure most people copy what they post, but certainly if they want to engage the blogger or site seriously they probably would... as you guys did with the Mr. Farley fiasco.

As of now I prefer to remain a meek commenter who survives at the whim of others. :)

I think you guys do a good job though and this blog has one of the most laissez faire attitudes towards comments, which I think is great.

And I'm going to keep coming back here to tell you how bored I am. This free ice cream is really crappy, Ms. Althouse!

I do think there truly was a golden age of Althouse commentary, though -- it was back when the blogging cockroach and Sir Archy made regular appearances. The more recent flocks of ankle-biters (vide referenced comment) are more noise than signal, and are not missed, with maybe one exception.

@Lyle. For some reason, for instance in OKs post, people are going to recommend TNC's methods. I was banned after my first comment after he said something and slammed all R's for not agreeing with it. I was short about disagreeing with 1:1 characterization and that was, for a while, the end of me. I was released later but what happens with that kind of moderation I think is that party line ad hominem attacks are encouraged. I forget who Ann banned recently but as 'Volokh' says it's a big internet. I'd like to see a list of Banned (commenters) sites on the blog roll. Could check on their flaming disagreements then.